Transfers

February 6th has a strong echo in my life as it was the day in 1967 that our family moved from Castleblayney in Co. Monaghan to Drogheda in Co. Louth. I was nine then and that was one of five moves that we made from when I was 3 to 18 years old. ( I also moved away from home when I was seventeen to go to College but that’s a different kind of moving.)

These moves were all within Ireland and were part of father’s job in the bank. Both he and mother had been in the bank from the early 1940s and had moved numerous times in their single days ~ their paths crossing when they were both based in Kilkenny City for a while.

As a kid, I found moving from place to place rather exciting and remember being full of excitement as I bade everyone in Castleblayney goodbye and watched all our belongings, which were packed in tea chests, being loaded into a huge big removal van.

Bank House, Castleblayney, Co. Monaghan

There’s no doubt that all the moves brought us very close together as a family ~ we only had each other until we made new friends. Going to new schools was daunting, especially landing there in the middle of term and having to get to grips with new teachers, new sets of rules and and, of course, all the existing pupils who tended to be curious about any newcomer.

Apart from family, tennis was the other anchor that made moving manageable. Tennis courts are the same size no matter where you go and the rules of the game are the same. It was always such a relief to get sorted in a tennis club and be able to feel at home hitting forehands and backhands like always!

We never knew how long we’d be staying in any one place ~ it ranged from 10 months to 8 years ~ but it was pretty certain that a transfer was never too far off. This never stopped me from putting down roots and getting incredibly attached to places but there was always that feeling of being a little bit on the sidelines.

St. Patrick’s Day always made me feel this ‘outsidedness’ more than any other. I can vividly remember watching St. Patrick’s Days Parades from our Bank House window in the middle of Drogheda and feeling that I simply didn’t belong in the town. To this day, I’ve never be a part of a St. Patrick’s Day Parade! Perhaps, this year I’ll get stuck into our local one here in Tramore, which is the place I was born and the place to which I eventually returned full-time in 1991.

More than anything, all the moving as a child, brought it home to me how every single place has lots and lots to offer; new people, new landscape, a depth of local history. Much of this can be taken for granted by people who have always lived in the same place but through new eyes it can be a whole new adventure.

The Viaduct, Drogheda, Co. Louth.

It certainly doesn’t surprise me, after all this, that it is very often people who are ‘blow ins’ who blog or write about the wonders of places.

Are you a person who moved around as a child or did you spend your childhood in the one place? 

 

 

Blogging Down the Years

Thoughts of  the unfolding of years are among the Decemebery things that come round every year for me like berried holly and fresh mistletoe.

As I was out walking yesterday, I was thinking of how so much of own’s life can be encapsulated by thinking of the defining events, images, memories associated with particular years in each decade.

This brought me to:

1964 ~ I was seven and we had just moved to Castleblayney, Co. Monaghan. That was a whole new adventure and it was the last year in which all five of us (Mother, Dad and us three kids) were together as a family as my sister headed off to boarding school in 1965.  Being insulated by a warm, warm family is what stands out most as well as the arrival of our very first television in time for Christmas.

Running Free
Photo: Frank Tubridy

1974: I did my Leaving Certificate in 1974 by which time we were living in Drogheda, Co. Louth.  It was a year of turmoil in quite a lot of ways and the Troubles in Northern Ireland were a huge worry.

I had placed all my hopes on pursuing a career in tennis but a serious wrist injury put all that on hold.  I had deferred taking up a university place in the hope that summer surgery would rectify the problem but by the December it was clear that a career in tennis was out of the question. That was the year I began learning to drive and it was also the year that my sister and I were re-united as she came back ‘home’ to teach in the school that I had just left.  It was all a bit of a social whirl with big sis as ‘chaperone!’

The song I played over and over in 1974 was this one:

1984: This was a year in which I was still reeling from the death from cancer of my long-time boyfriend from cancer in 1981.

I was ensconced in Trinity College, where I had embarked on a PhD on the experiences of people with physical disabilities in Ireland and I was also very busy working as a researcher on an exciting EU project in the Midlands about the  integration of people with disabilities into society.

Tennis was back on the agenda and I simply adored being able to compete again after all the missed years.

Weather-Beaten
Photo: Frank Tubridy

1994: Undoubtedly the highlight of 1994 was pregnancy and anticipation of motherhood.

That was a year in which I was working in two areas I love: teaching and research and was able to work from home base here in Tramore.

Tramore Bay

 2004: This marked the last year that my parents were in good health but they loved spending time with our son, Harry, who was very close to both of them from the moment he was born.

This was a time of major juggling between work and ferrying 9-year old Harry to all sorts of sporting activities.

A major highlight of 2004 was Waterford’s victory in what is considered to be the greatest Munster Hurling Final of all time:

It’s a year I very much associate with my father’s photography and being down in my parents house hearing about their outings to places here in Co. Waterford which they adored.

Curraghmore, Co. Waterford
Photo: Frank Tubridy

 2014 ….. Right now, it’s hard to focus on highlights of 2014 but I certainly associate it with an ever-increasing love of Co. Waterford, nature, the ocean, blogging, poetry and a whole new adventure into the world of carpets.

And, of course, the new love affair with Stan!

Stan

 

 

 

Backwards and Forwards …

I’m just taking a breather from going through box after box of my late parent’s ‘stuff’ which has been living in our well-named ‘box-room’ for the last few years.

I’m extremely fortunate that my father had a huge interest in photography whilst Mother was big into writing.  So, it’s like having a family, as well as a social,  history in words and pictures at my finger tips.

I was more than surprised to find a little note that I wrote to Mother when I was about six. It’s written on what looks like the middle pages of a small note book and and has Mama on the outside. Here’s the note itself:

I know I was about six because of the reference to Frecky, or Freckles, who was one of a litter of pups that our lovely Dalmation, Beauty, had when I was that age.  The arrival and departure of those puppies was one of the biggest events of my childhood.

Not long after finding this note to Mother, I came upon a photograph that Father took of me on the wooden swing that was just beside the  cobbled yard where the pups played.  We were living in Castleblayney, Co. Monaghan,  in the first Bank House of our family life.

They were happy, happy days and I can’t but smile at how I seemed to see twenty as being an absolute age away. I suppose it was, in many respects. Twenty certainly seems like a good while back now, though!!

I wonder if  Mother even contemplated the possibility that I would find the note all these years on. I’m just so glad that she did my bidding and kept it.

Happy Me, Aged 6
Photo: Frank Tubridy

 

 

Drums and Drumming Times ~ Gatherings from Ireland # 337

Drum Jam today at 4! Drums will be provided, and you don’t need to know drumming. No registration either, just turn up.

This post that appeared on my Facebook Timeline this morning, via my friend Asha in India, got my heart thumping to the rhythm of other places and another time.

It was just before Christmas when I was seven and in school in Castleblayney, Co. Monaghan.  Our class had a band in the school concert and thankfully everyone was included, even me with my deafer than deaf musical ears.

I was one of three drummers, standing proudly in the back row, beating the tiny little drum with sticks that I think of every time I grab the handle of my smallest wooden spoon.

We were all wearing our school uniforms and homemade cardboard hats. I must have made fifty of those hats, cutting up every bit of cardboard that loitered around the house. Try as I did, I just couldn’t get the whole hat sorted so that it would actually sit on my head as I concentrated on my drumming!

Dad to the rescue with a Kellogg’s Cornflakes box, measuring tape from Mother’s sewing box, wooden ruler, sharp scissors,  his precious glue with the little brush ~ not my flour and water concoction ~,  and fancy red crepe paper that he produced like magic from his locked-up stash of  stationery in his ‘bolt-hole’ that Mother called ‘The Steptoe’  after the TV Series of the time, Steptoe and Son. 

Two nights on stage in the school hall ~ it might as well have been Broadway or The West End, I was so excited.

Skipping home along Main Street when it was all over and the Christmas holidays stretching ahead, holding Dad’s hand, and that wry smile he gave me when I told him that the girls in the class had said he was the most handsome father there …..

Now, I have to head off and ready myself for Bangalore at 4pm!

Bank Houses ~ Gatherings from Ireland # 49

Banks may have become ‘bad news’ in Ireland in recent years  but there is a side of Irish banking that was long lost before the current recession and that is the ‘bank house’ and the families who used to live in them.

I belonged to one such family as my father joined the Bank of Ireland on May 15, 1928 and we lived in a host of different towns until he retired in 1981. The tall bank buildings that one sees on Main Streets in cities and towns, the length and breadth of Ireland, were once ‘home’ to families like ours and the upstairs rooms that are now offices were once sitting-rooms, bedrooms, dining rooms and the car parks of today were the gardens where so many kids like me played  and had precious flower and vegetable plots.

On this day in 1968, we were packing up all our belongings in the bank house in Castleblayney, Co. Monaghan where we had lived for four years. I remember well saying a tearful ‘goodbye’ to all the rooms and then skating up and down Main Street one last time to bid farewell to the neighbours.

Bank of Ireland, Main Street, Castleblayney, Co. Monaghan (1960s)

The Bank House in Drogheda was waiting!

Wild Flowers in Ireland ~ An Appreciation

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One of my most vivid memories from childhood is gathering wild flowers with my mother to enter a competition at Castlebayney Agricultural Show back in the 1960s.  It was a happy, happy time and, even though I was very young, I knew that Mother was enjoying  the adventure just as much as I was.

Mother died almost three years ago, aged 88,  and today I unearthed an article which she wrote around the time that we were collecting the wild flowers.  Reading it,  I became acutely aware of just how deeply she appreciated nature and how it is no coincidence that the re-emergence of wild flowers, especially in spring,  is so fundamentally important to me.  Here is what she wrote:

 Flowers, especially wild flowers, played a large part in my childhood in Co. Meath. In the woods at home grew masses of snowdrops, under the trees, making the winter woodlands beautiful with their dainty white flowers among dark green ivy leaves. Oh, the thrill of the first snowdrop. To know that spring was on its way, and soon my beloved woods would be awakening from their winter slumbers. My birthday is in late January, and perhaps that is why I loved the snowdrops so much. They were my special flower. I would search the woods diligently, and always succeeded in finding enough to decorate the table for my birthday tea. After I left home, my mother never failed to include a tiny bunch of snowdrops in my birthday parcel. Snowdrops have always been synonomous with home to me, and although I have moved home umpteen times, I always plant a few snowdrop bulbs in each new garden.

Then there were the lesser celandines. There was a wood at home which was completely carpeted with them. Surprisingly early in the year, not long after the snowdrops were in bloom, that particular wood was filled with birdsong, sunshine, the tender green leaves of the celandines, and the little golden flowers.

And then came the primroses; primroses and baby chicks are always associated in my mind. They both arrive around Easter time and are the same delicious pale yellow. There was a stream at home which ran between very steep, sloping banks on which great clumps of primroses grew. Primroses abounded in the woods as well, but I loved to pick them on the banks of the stream. There was always a distinct danger of falling in, and of course this added to the fun. There were periwinkles in the woods too. They made a lovely posy, their tender blue toning beautifully with the pale yellow primroses.

In a dark corner of a laurel grove grew a few shy wood anenomes. Never enough to pick, but I had to visit them each year and admire the few precious blossoms.

Bluebells and beech trees go together, and the bluebells are in blossom just as those beautiful fresh young beech leaves unfold. To me, there are few lovelier sights than a carpet of bluebells dappled by the sunshine in a beech wood.

Cowslips were not very plentiful in our part of the country, but there was one field where they flourished. I used to make a pilgrimage to see the cowslips every year. I remember a grown-up explaining to me how to make a cowslip ball. I was horrified.  How anyone could do that to my lovely cowslips!

I always prefer to see flowers growing, and when I do pick them  I like to pick them here and there so that they will not be missed. Lilac grew in the woods, too. There was one big lilac bush in the wood by the river.  Oh, the scent of that lilac with the dew on it, on a warm May morning.

We always went to stay with my grandmother in the early summer. She lived in Co. Kildare, and when I think of going there I think of dog-roses. The road from the station was always bathed in sunshine, with blue mountains in the distance, and the hedges simply covered with dog-roses and honeysuckle. And in the tillage fields on either side of the road, there were wild red poppies. I know farmers don’t like wild poppies much, but I loved them. Oh, let me have dog-roses and honeysuckle and poppies for my holidays. Nothing in all the travel brochures can give me such a thrill.

Poetry ~ A Profound Social Bridge

Poetry played a fundamental part in my treasured relationship with my late mother. However, it is only in recent months, as a result of posing a simple question on Linkedin, that I have come to realise the power of poetry in connecting people from all around the world. I write about this in Section Ten of Social Bridges.